


Cinnamon Brown Sugar

by missmichellebelle



Category: Glee RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Bakery, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Bakery, Fluff, Meet-Cute
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-21
Updated: 2014-12-21
Packaged: 2018-03-02 14:42:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2815829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missmichellebelle/pseuds/missmichellebelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chris can’t cook pasta without ruining it somehow, and yet he can make a perfect, delicious batch of cookies every time without even following a recipe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cinnamon Brown Sugar

**Author's Note:**

> This was written as a gift for [wickedwonder](http://wickedwonder.tumblr.com) over on tumblr as a part of the [CrissColfer Holiday Gift Exchange](http://secretcrisscolferunicorn.tumblr.com). I hope she liked it. <3
> 
> As a side note, _wow_ it's been a long time since I've written them. I'm not even sure I did them justice, I am ridiculously out of practice. D;

It starts to rain as Chris swaps aprons and takes Piper’s place at the counter. It’s a lazy dribble at first, but it doesn’t take long to work itself up to a good pour, and Chris finds himself watching it beat and run down the windows of the storefront—mostly because he has nothing else to do. Chris isn’t out front very often, his presence there probably just as rare as this California rain. He was hired for his baking talent, after all, not his social skills, and the chance that he might have to interact with a customer always makes him anxious.

But clearly, that anxiety is moot today. The rain seems to have driven people inside, or perhaps kept them there, because no one so much as passes by the window.

Chris is perfectly fine with that.

He pulls some blank receipt paper from the register, skin feeling itchy the way it tends to when he knows he should be working but isn’t actually doing something. There’s a dozen different doughs that need to be prepared, fillings and frostings that need to be made, and looking at the display case he can see that they’re running dangerously low on their chocolate overdose cookies… Chris’s fingers twitch as he picks up a pen, knowing he needs to distract himself with something, and he spins it between his fingertips before placing the tip to the receipt, and—

Making a rather large dot, because he doesn’t have any words.

He hates admitting it to himself, but he doesn’t write as much as he once did. Not that he doesn’t still love it, or doesn’t have a million and one ideas, he just doesn’t have the time. Well, that’s not necessarily true, either, but the time that he does have he generally uses for things that don’t require any sort of mental energy. Like sleeping. The most attention Chris’s laptop gets these days is for a good Netflix binge.

It’s the choice he made, Chris knows, as he taps the pen repeatedly into the same inked-blue spot. Because while writing comes to Chris as easily as breathing ( _sometimes_ ), so does baking. A fact that still doesn’t register with him fully, because he can’t cook pasta without ruining it somehow, and yet he can make a perfect, delicious batch of cookies every time without even following a recipe.

(It makes zero sense, Chris knows that, but defying the laws of reason doesn’t seem to deter his baking skill—to him, it’s like being able to write prose but not poetry. Apples and oranges, right?)

Baking was the easy choice. When someone’s talent is baking, the direction for them to go is clear—buy them an Easy-Bake oven, let them make dessert every Thanksgiving, encourage them to apply to culinary schools and submit recipes for scholarships. And because everyone has an opinion on food. Everyone knows if food tastes good or bad. Chris can watch the way people’s eyes light up when they take a bite of one of his pastries and he knows they think it’s delicious, that they think he has a gift, and the words that follow are full of praise but they have nothing on that  _look_.

He doesn’t get that with his writing. Not that his parents, his family, his teachers, encouraged him any less, but it was… Different. Chris knew it was different. When people hold a piece of his writing that he was brave enough to share in their hands, they don’t get that delighted look in their eyes. Because knowing what good writing is, knowing what  _great_  writing is, is all a grey area. The pinched eyebrows and default smiles of encouragement just weren’t enough for Chris. It didn’t stop him from writing, but it did stop him from  _sharing_ , and Chris is pretty sure his parents don’t even remember that he likes to do it anymore.

The rain patters against the glass like a clock slowly ticking down time, and Chris’s pen taps fall into the rhythm. Once upon a time, rainy days like this were his favorite writing days. Now here he is, watching it fall, and not feeling the tiniest bit inspired. Maybe because he can’t stop thinking about the cinnamon roll dough he needs to start on if they’re going to have fresh baked ones in the morning…

The bell rings suddenly as the door is pushed open too quickly, and Chris draws a sharp blue line across the receipt paper. He frowns at it—well, it’s not like he was going to use it for anything else, right?

When he looks up again, it’s with that familiar seed of trepidation in his stomach, the one he gets whenever there’s a chance that he might have to interact with people he hasn’t known for at least six months. The bell is clinging again as the door shuts, and a man is standing not far from it, dripping wet all over the tile floor. Chris’s mouth thins into a line—they really should have a mat down, or something.

“It is  _really_  coming down out there, shit,” the man curses, his voice loud in the otherwise silent bakery, and Chris wonders if he’s being spoken to or if the guy is just thinking out loud.

Chris grips the countertop—wood, not laminate, because Valerie doesn’t skimp where it counts—and knows he should say something, greet the customer, but can’t make his mouth open. He’ll just… Wait it out. Unless he just came in to get out of the rain, he’ll probably walk up to the counter and order something and Chris can revert into customer-service-robot-mode.

But the guy doesn’t move, aside from glancing around to take in where he is, and Chris feels suddenly resigned when he realizes the guy  _did_  just come in to get out of the rain.

He hopes the stranger is just as socially uncomfortable as he is.

“If I’d known it was going to rain today, I probably would have dressed for it,” he says, dashing Chris’s hopes. A talker, then.  _Great_.

But yeah, the guy isn’t really dressed for rain, his seasonably appropriate jacket soaked completely through by the rain. To be honest, he looks like he dove into a pool without bothering to take anything off first, and Chris can’t help but wonder how long he was out in the storm.

He also can’t help but notice that the guy is handsome in that default, Disney-prince sort of way, and with the curly hair and the  _dripping wet_  thing, Chris feels like he’s living that scene in Pride and Prejudice when Colin Firth walks out of the lake.

If he wasn’t forced into a social situation, he probably wouldn’t mind it all that much.

When it becomes clear that Chris doesn’t plan on making small talk over the rain, the guy’s friendly smile falters, and he stands up straight, trying to smooth the wrinkles out of his wet jacket.

“Shit, I got water all over the floor, I’m sorry.” Another smile pops up, this one apologetic. “I’ll clean it up.”

Customer service mode, activate.

“It’s fine,” Chris replies in that special voice he has on reserve for speaking to strangers or just people who make him feel uncomfortable in general (like his doctor, or his boss, or his mother). “Someone will take care of it.” Chris probably should, but he doesn’t know where the mop is. He’ll let Piper deal with it, when she gets back.

“You sure? I don’t want someone to slip—“

“It’s fine,” Chris stresses again, tone clipped and more on the rude side than he intended, and the guy’s mouth snaps shut like a reprimanded child’s.

Chris prefers silence nine times out of ten, but the silence that follows at that moment is the heavy, awkward kind that no one enjoys. Again, Chris wishes there was something for him to do, but he was put there to help customers. And there’s a potential one in front of him.

“It smells delicious in here,” the stranger continues, apparently not willing to let a dead horse lie (at least, Chris was pretty sure he’d killed the horse with his last comment, but clearly he was mistaken).

“Cookies,” Chris replies, because he knows the baking schedule as well as he knows the days of the week. “We bake a second batch every afternoon to get us through the evening.” And sometimes to keep product on the plate the following morning as they do their primary round of baking. Cookies are a low priority for the morning bakers, so they tend to be the last things done.

“Yeah?” The guy grins again, and he seems to be made of smiles for how often he seems to be wearing one. “What kind?”

“Right now?” Chris’s eyes roll upwards thoughtfully. “I think we have honey ginger, cinnamon brown sugar, and lemon shortbread.”

“ _Stop_ ,” he groans suddenly, and Chris starts in surprise as he realizes how much closer the customer suddenly is. “Those sound so fucking delicious. So what’s that I’m smelling, in particular?”

“Cinnamon brown sugar,” Chris says with an almost gut-like response.

“And how long until I can eat one?” He’s leaning on the counter now, and it makes Chris uncomfortable enough that he actually takes a step back, as awkward and obvious as it is.

“Little over an hour?” They’ll be out of the oven soon, but they need to rest and cool before they can even think about serving them.

“ _Really?_  That’s so long.” It comes out as a whine, but the guy is still grinning and even kind of laughing so it’s not nearly as annoying as it could be.

“Perfection takes time,” Chris retorts airily.

“Are you saying your baked goods are perfect?” It’s teasing, and… Flirty, even? Maybe. Chris has a hard time telling the difference between  _flirty_  and  _friendly_ , even when it’s his mouth the comment is coming out of.

It throws him for a loop, too.  _Your baked goods_. And Chris stands there for a moment and wonders how the guy knows that a lot of the recipes they use came straight out of Chris’s head, or that he has a hand in baking over half of the things they serve, before it dawns on him that the guy probably just means the bakery’s baked goods in general.

“I am.” Chris pauses for a beat. “Of course, perfection is objective. If you eat something you don’t like normally, obviously you wouldn’t think our version was perfect.”

“But if it was something I did like?” The stranger challenges, and Chris gives him a sly smile—the one he gets in return is about a thousand times brighter. “All right then, challenge accepted—“ he comes to a full stop, his eyes scanning over Chris’s entire body in a way that feels a little violating. “Where’s your name tag?”

“What?”

“Your name tag.” The guy draws a circle over his chest where a name tag might be pinned on an employee in another establishment. “Where is it?”

“I don’t have one?” It comes out as a question, because if he’s not wearing one,  _clearly_  he does not have one.

“You don’t have one?”

“I believe that’s what I just said, yes—“

“Then how am I supposed to know your name?”

And Chris stops himself before he asks,  _Why on earth would you want to know my name?_  It’s one thing to be visibly uncomfortable and unsure, and another to let it tumble out of his mouth. Chris might not be able to control how his body reacts, but he sure as hell can dictate what does and does not come out of his mouth.

“It’s not like I know yours,” Chris counters, because why should customers know his name when he doesn’t know theirs? Besides, it’s not like he’s out front on a regular basis. He works behind the scenes. It’s always been that way. He’s pretty sure most of the customers don’t even know he exists in a specific sense. He’s just  _one of the bakers_ , and Chris is fine with that. True, he doesn’t really get credit for any of the work he does past from anyone outside the staff, but the empty plates he sees when he comes in every day, the sign that all of his hard work sold, is enough acknowledgement for him.

Most of the time.

“Darren.”

“Excuse me?”

“My name. It’s Darren. Your turn.”

Well. Chris can’t say he was expecting that.  _Darren_  stares at him imploringly, and Chris is distracted by the way the curls around his face have started drying.

“Uh—it’s Chris.” He averts his eyes and walks towards the bake case, fiddling with his fingers.

“Well then, challenge accepted,  _Chris_.” Darren says it with a hint of amusement that Chris doesn’t understand but immediately wants to, and therefore promptly ignores.

“Sweet-sweet or spicy-sweet?” Chris asks, fingers drumming against the sliding glass doors, keeping his eyes trained on the baked goods inside. It’s stupid,  _he’s_  being stupid. It’s not like them suddenly knowing each other’s names changes  _anything_. Even if it does feel like Darren suddenly has this weird hold over him. Like he found out Chris’s secret identity, or something.

“Well, considering I will be eating one of those cinnamon cookies in my near future, let’s go with sweet-sweet,” Darren decides, and Chris already knows what cookie to pull. He doesn’t bother with a pastry bag, just grabs it in a piece of cut parchment and hands it over. He’s pretty sure that’s not how things are done, that it has to be paid for first, but Chris is suddenly aware of how little time he has left before he has to go back to doing what he does best.

Which is clearly not socializing with cute boys, but that’s not news to him.

“It’s our cereal killer cookie,” Chris explains, and Darren let’s out a chuckle at the pun. “It’s Captain Crunch, Trix, and marshmallows.”

Darren eyes the cookie like it is the most confusing thing he has ever seen, and then promptly takes a bite out of it.

And there it is. That light. The one that has Chris smiling without meaning to.

“Holy  _shit_ ,” is all Darren has to say before he’s putting the sweet back into his mouth, and Chris knows that his smile is just starting to transition into an embarrassingly giddy grin when Piper pushes through the back doors.

“I’ve come to save you,” she announces, and then realizes that there is an actual customer there and Chris was actually engaging him. She looks surprised in a way that maybe should be insulting, but isn’t—Chris isn’t exactly quiet about his disdain for interacting with strangers.

“Good. I have cinnamon rolls to start and chocolate overdoses to bake.” Chris stalls for just a second, throwing a glance at Darren, before he finally starts to move away. “He hasn’t paid for that,” Chris tells Piper, and she salutes him as he starts untying his apron.

“Wait,” Darren suddenly says, slightly muffled in a way that lets Chris know he still has cookie in his cheek. “To  _bake?_ ”

And Chris feels his neck start to flush. It’s not like he hides the fact that he’s a baker or anything, but it feels a little like he’d been tooting his own horn. He’d called his baked goods  _perfect_ , and it’s one thing to say that about someone else and another entirely to say it about himself. Chris suddenly feels the urge to defend himself, insisting that he usually isn’t that vain and conceited,  _really_ , but Piper speaks before he has the chance.

“Yep! Chris is our lead baker, and he came up with most of our recipes, too,” she gushes, the way she always loves to do, like Chris is her baby and not four years older than her. “Including the cookie you’re eating.”

Chris and Darren lock eyes for just a second, and then Chris realizes that he can’t deal with whatever happens next, so… He doesn’t. He gives Darren a shrug and then pushes back into the bakery, where Valerie is pulling the cinnamon brown sugars from the oven.

“You survived,” she says with little enthusiasm, and Chris bats his hand at her teasing, trying to distract himself from the weird-as-fuck thing that just happened to him by concentrating on cinnamon rolls.

When the cinnamon cookies cool, and Chris starts to prepare them for plating, he picks the most delicious looking one and slides it into a white pastry bag. He has no idea if Darren stuck around, and actually seriously doubts it, but he still ends up writing, “ **FOR DARREN, WITH THE BAKER’S PROMISE OF PERFECTION** ,” right on the bag. When Piper dips into the back to grab the fresh baked, she’s laughing, and her eyes catch the bag immediately.

“For Darren, huh?” She wiggles her eyebrows, and Chris levels her with a glare that has her laughing again. “I’ll give it to him.”

And Chris is sure that’s the end of it. So when Piper comes back not long later, clutching a piece of receipt paper and handing it to him with a sly smile, Chris is ridiculously confused.

**I LIKE A GUY WHO KEEPS HIS PROMISES. - D**

He smiles so hard that he pushes it into his hand, and then folds the note carefully before sliding it into his back pocket. He could go and say something, is kind of certain that Darren is still out there and maybe even expecting him to, but can’t quite pull up the nerve.

Maybe next time. Because for some reason, Chris is suddenly sure there will be one. If for nothing more than another cinnamon brown sugar cookie.

**Author's Note:**

> [Read, Reblog, & Like on Tumblr](http://missmichellebelle.tumblr.com/post/105753299140/cinnamon-brown-sugar)


End file.
